Programming XTras

Evan D. Schoenberg, M.D.

2013-09-29 00:31:48 UTC

Doug,

Greetings,
I've always wanted to look into programming, but never had a good project to tackle. I constantly use Adium and wish there was a way to flip the message box to have the input field at the top, and have new messages go from top to bottom. This way I can place the Message Window at the bottom of my screen, Always on Top of all windows, and have conversations flow off the bottom of the screen.
It's a tall order, and I figure I'm probably the only one who wants this (as searching your site doesn't show anyone else who's tackled anything similar), so I thought I might try and program it myself. My question is: is this possible? Does Adium allow this much modification of its appearance, or are those controls locked off from Xtras modifying them? I thought it'd be better to know now than go far into learning programming, only to discover what I wanted to do wasn't possible in the first place.

This probably wouldn't be possible at present purely from an Xtra. A long time ago, Adium had the interface separated out such that it could be fairly easily replaced by a new interface plugin, but that turned out to cause a lot of complexity for an edge case, and I believe that this flexibility is no longer found in the current code base.

An experienced programmer could potentially add the needed hooks to the main Adium codebase and convince the current development team to include it such that your companion Xtra could work, but this is a fairly tall order. I'm not saying you couldn't do it as your first programming project, but I would suggest cutting your teeth on smaller projects first rather than biting off more than you can chew and ending up discouraged.

Best,
Evan

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://adium.im/pipermail/devel_adium.im/attachments/20130928/36ac45a4/attachment.html>